HANG OR ANTI-HANG
SIR,—Surely Mr. Wilson Harris in his article under this heading mistakes the real reason why so many support the Lords rather than the Commons on this question. He states that the case for hanging rests on the single contention that the fear of the gallows is the only effective deterrent, but is this true ? One finds, in conversation with all classes of people, that their attitude is that a man or woman who commits a cold-blooded murder deserves to die. They are not wedded to any particular method of extinction ; they recognise there are degrees of murder which should receive, as they do, clemency, but this still leaves a number of cases which call for the extreme penalty, not as a deterrent, but as an act of justice.
The dreadful casualty list of road deaths is, as Mr. Harris himself suggests, beside the point. The problem of making our roads safer can, and must be, dealt with ; but to seek to compare such accidental death, or even culpable negligence amounting to manslaughter, with a person who, perhaps in revolting circumstances, kills another, on the ground that the victims in each case are equally dead, appears to be begging the
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